Beijing Plans Health Care For Everyone

BEIJING -- China has unveiled an ambitious plan to achieve universal health care. The plan, released for public debate last week, lays out in broad strokes plans to introduce greater health-care funding and control prices. The current system leaves out much of the population and forces the rest to pay heavy out-of-pocket expenses.

Overhauling China's health-care system has global significance, given the country's demographic heft, its frequent role as epicenter of infectious diseases and its growing importance in health innovations ranging from organ donation to the use of traditional Chinese medicine.

"What happens in China is a major driver in the dynamics of global health," said medical journal Lancet.

The overall goal of the plan is to cover 90% of the population within two years and achieve universal health care by 2020.

One major point in the draft is to return to the nonprofit motive for national health care. This was dismantled in the 1980s as China cut public services, especially in the countryside. Today, public hospitals receive little government funding and are pressed to operate like businesses. The peddling of experimental, costly drugs and treatments has become rampant.